Sandy Stone was a problem that Janice Raymond, author of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, decided to take care of. Raymond felt that Stone — an out trans woman who was part of the radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective, Olivia Records — didn’t belong. Raymond engineered a smear campaign that nearly destroyed the Collective and put Stone’s life in jeopardy, culminating in armed TERFs asserting their intention to murder Stone.

Olivia Records was a successful radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective located in California. The Collective was widely seen as the powerhouse behind the 1970s women’s music movement. It was also a trans-inclusive space. Not only did this RadFem space welcome Stone as the woman she was, the Collective helped Stone access the trans medical care she needed.

What follows is a detailed account of what Stone – and this Radical Feminist women’s community – endured at the hands of the TERF movement.

Cristan Williams: Can you tell me how you first became aware of the TERF movement?

Sandy Stone: That would have been the Janice Raymond incident. That came in the context of my work with Olivia Records. When I was first approached by representatives of Olivia Records, which I think was in 1974, I immediately told them that I was trans and in fact, they had already heard that I was trans from Leslie Ann Jones, who was an assistant recording engineer in San Francisco. So, we were already in clear communication about the fact that I was trans and they were very open to working with me. They mostly wanted to know if our politics agreed and whether or not I could work with a lesbian separatist collective. They badly needed engineering skills.

The collective was very clear that they considered me to be a woman. We spent a long time – about a year, maybe more – in which we got to know each other and by the time that I actually joined the collective, we felt that we knew all that we needed to know about how we were going to get along together. And so, I joined the collective and went to live with them in Wilshire District of LA, where we had three houses: two next to each other and one across the street. There were 13 members of the collective after a while. I think that when I joined there were 11.

That’s the background. I wanted to give you that background because what happened with Raymond was so betraying, so bizarre and so completely unexpected.

We received an 11 x 14 envelope containing parts of the chapter of her book that she would later title Sappho by Surgery. The copy we received to review didn’t name me personally, but it was clearly pitched to out me. The Collective passed the piece around, with our usual comment sheet attached, and by the time it got to me there were maybe eight or nine comments on it already. The comments were, “This is garbage!” and “Holy cow, what’s wrong with this person!” and “This bears no relation to reality.” and “Where does she get this stuff?” As the only trans women in the Collective that I knew of, I felt it my obligation to take a moderate position on it and although I thought that it was disgusting and completely out of left field – I mean, none of us recognized that what we were dealing with was hate, it just looked like another weirdo writing a pseudoscientific paper — so, my comment was, “The world really needs a book on this topic, but this is not that book.” That was all I said and I passed it on to Judy and we sent it back to Raymond with the comment sheet attached and we thought that that was the end of it. We just didn’t understand the depth of hate.

Then, we began to get hate mail. Before all of that, we’d been just working along – we had a lot of stuff on our plates – we had a distribution network, we were making albums, we were doing PR, but mainly, we were all concentrated on making women’s music for women as a political act of love and hopefully, make enough money to keep the collective going.

All of a sudden came this thing from left field. We were being broadsided by hate mail. The hate mail initially took a form that was so recognizable that Ginny Berson diagrammed it out. We’d get a letter and the letter would attack one of our albums because of the way that it was engineered and mixed. There were very clear ideas of what constituted a “male” mix and a “female” mix, which nobody had ever heard of before. What it came down to was that “male” mixes had drums, which was linked back to “throbbing male energy.”

Cristan: [Laughs] I’m sorry. That’s just ridiculous!

Sandy Stone at Olivia Records

Sandy: Believe me, I’m glad to have someone laugh along because it was funny to me at the time, but it was deadly serious to the people who were writing and it turned out to be catastrophic for us as a Collective, although we didn’t realize it at the time. I was a process of being educated to the level of [anti-trans] hatred. At this time, within the Collective, I was planning on converting the living room of the house next door to be a school so that we could teach women to record, so that there would be a lot of women with engineering skills. In the meantime, we’re getting hate mail about me. After a while the hate mail got so vicious that Sandy, who worked in the mail room, made a decision to not pass that mail along to me. This was vile stuff. A lot of it included death threats. They would let me know about the death threats after a while. The death threats were directed at me, but there were violent consequences proposed for the Collective if they didn’t get rid of me.

The more hate mail that arrived, the more we could perceive that there was organizing going on, outside of the Collective, that had to do with transphobia and with isolating trans people wherever they popped up. I was not alone.

This pattern escalated. We were organizing what was for us, a major tour. We wanted to tour the country and provide women’s music for women in major cities along our route. It was the first time anything like that had been attempted. We were very intent on it and it was extremely energy-absorbing. It took all our energy to get it going. We had an entire network of lesbian separatist producers, people who could organize local logistical support, people who could advertise tickets and handle the selling and we wanted it to be completely done by women.

Anyway, we had organized this tour and we had gotten a letter telling us that when we got to Seattle that there was a separatist paramilitary group called the Gorgons. The Gorgons was a group of women who wore cammo gear, shaved their heads and carried live weapons. We were told that when we got to town, they were going to kill me.

Cristan: Wait, they said that they were going to KILL you if you came to Seattle?

Sandy: Yes, but we kind of laughed about it. We thought that was just talk, but then we heard it was actually true. So, we began checking this out and the women who had booked the hall for us said, “Yes! These people are real and you guys had better do something about this because they’re serious!”

We did, in fact, go to Seattle, but we went as probably the only women’s music tour that was ever done with serious muscle security. They were very alert for weapons and, in fact, Gorgons did come and they did have guns taken away from them.

I was pants-wetting scared at that event. I was terrified. During a break between a musical number someone shouted out “GORGONS!” and I made it from my seat at the console to under the table the console was on at something like superluminal speed. I stayed under there until it was clear that I wasn’t about to be shot… Not that it would have done me any good to be under there.

Cristan: The sheer oppressive weight of this impending violence that was hanging over your head, that’s ready to drop upon you and the people you work with and care about at any moment… That had to feel like terrorism; it’s terror inducing. How did you deal with that kind of pressure, day in, day out, when it became clear that that there were TERFs who were prepared to kill you for being trans?

TERF letter published in Sister, 1977

Sandy: [Long pause] I dealt with it in stages. In the beginning, I felt really protected by the women of the Collective. I felt that we, as a collective unit, would stand in solidarity. In fact, the Collective sent a letter to… I’d have to go look for the name of the publication. I can’t remember.

Cristan: Was it Sister?

Sandy: Yes!

Published in the June, 1977 issue of Sister, what follows are excerpts from the Collective’s response to TERF hate:

Because Sandy decided to give up completely and permanently her male identity and live as a woman and a lesbian, she is now faced with the same kinds of oppression that other women and lesbians face. She must also cope with the ostracism that all of society imposes on a transsexual. In evaluating whom we trust as a close ally, we take a person’s history into consideration, but our focus as political lesbians is on what her actions are now. If she is a person who comes from privilege, has she renounced that which is oppressive in her privilege, and is she sharing with other women that which is useful? Is she aware of her own oppression? Is she open to struggle around class, race, and other aspects of lesbian feminist politics? These were our yardsticks in deciding whether to work with a woman who grew up with male privilege. We felt that Sandy met those same criteria that we apply to any woman with whom we plan to work closely.

As to why we did not immediately bring this issue to the attention of the national women’s community, we have to say that to us, Sandy Stone is a person, not an issue.

All of us are looking forward to the day when work can begin on our studio and Sandy can start training other women. As we do of each other, we ask everything of Sandy, and she gives it. She has chosen to make her life with us and we expect to grow old together working and sharing.

Sandy: That was the way the Collective was responding to the public debate. Then we had a very foul debate in which, when we looked around, the people affiliated with the Collective, who lived in Oakland, immediately said that, “Wait, these women are not from here. There’s a group here from Chicago that are known to be head breakers!” I think she meant that they were there to stir up trouble.

We brought four or five women from the Collective, and me, and our idea was – very naively – that we would have a rational discussion about trans people and the women’s community. It started off with a woman, I’d never met her and I have no idea who she was, standing up and delivering a long statement which consisted of bizarre misinformation about the psychological origin of being trans, that is was a twisted pathological state and that trans people posed a danger, because of our pathology, and how we were perverting the women’s community and bringing pathological energy into it. While she was saying all of this, several women from the Collective were looking at me with their eyebrows up in shock and I was sitting there with my jaw dropping, and when she finished, the Collective women on either side of me said that I should respond to it. I was, just without words. I said the totally wrong thing. I think anything that I said would probably have been seen as being wrong, but I think I picked the most wrong thing to say. All I could think of to say was – in a normal speaking tone – “But… But, this is bullshit.”

The meeting immediately erupted in screaming. People were standing on tables, screaming about me and about the evils of me, and about how it was all true because here was the proof because I had not engaged in a “womanly” way. Nobody could stop it. Nobody could calm it down. The TERFs refused to stop disrupting the meeting unless I left the room. After a while, we did a little huddle and some of the Collective women said, “We can’t have Sandy leave. That’s just not acceptable.” I said, “Look, I think I’d better leave because this is not going to go anywhere with me here.” Eventually we agreed on that and I left.

I went back to the Wilshire District in LA because all I wanted to do was to crawl into a hole, in a fetal position and try to shake it off. The rest of the group came back traumatized. They said that after I had left, that there was no rational discussion, that there was a lot of hate about me, and a lot of anger with the Collective for employing me – which I wasn’t; I was a member, not an employee – and they began to realize for the first time that there wasn’t going to be a rational debate. They really began to understand that something was going on that was quite loathsome and that we couldn’t respond to in any reasonable way.

Cristan: So, coming to recognize that you and the Collective were facing real hate, how were you able to deal with such animosity?

Sandy: We realized that we just couldn’t respond to that level of hate. We stopped responding to the hate mail. We used to respond to the hate mail even if it was to say, “Thank you letter, we appreciate your opinion.” But even that just became impossible. Dealing with the hate was taking up too much time. We all dealt with it by focusing more on our work. However, that didn’t mean that that much hate didn’t affect me.

Cristan: It’s not uncommon to hear from victims of TERF abuse talk about experiencing something akin to PTSD, after trying unsuccessfully to stop months of harassment. I mean, it’s hard enough being trans, but add onto that the experience of having some extreme hate directed at you personally, it’s not a benign thing. It really does affect the lives of their victims.

Sandy: I had begun to think that we potentially had a worse situation than I thought we’d had. The consequence for me was that it was an emotional roller coaster. As I had mentioned, there was the tour that we were trying to do. I was putting up a front of being okay and the consequence was that after the Seattle gig, I passed out while trying to work.

Cristan: So, wait… You had gone from really coming to understand the visceral hate you were facing from that meeting, to having so much hate mail that the Collective just stopped dealing with it, to having this TERF group announce its intention to murder you…

Sandy: Well, there was more. We couldn’t afford to buy touring equipment, like Pas, mic stands, the mixer board; I built all that stuff from scratch out of whatever parts I could find to support the tour. That was a hell of a lot there, adding to the strain too because it all had to be built well and work right because we couldn’t stop to repair anything en rout, and, fortunately, it actually all worked as it was supposed to. But all of that was going on too.

It would be reasonable to say that I was under a bit of pressure and that it wasn’t easy and that it really affected me.

When we had the boycott threat, that was when I decided to leave the Collective.

Cristan: I’ve done several interviews around the trans caricatures Janice Raymond created for the TERF community to go after. I talked to Robin Tyler and she told me about how TERFs physically attacked her for standing between them and a trans women they wanted to beat at the 1973 Lesbian Conference. These radical feminist institutions – the 73 Conference, Olivia Records – they were trans-inclusive. Each time TERFs turned to harassment and violence to insert themselves into feminist spaces. Thus far ,TERFs like Raymond have gotten away with creating this false narrative about how their Radical Feminist spaces were being invaded by violent trans women and it’s just not the case.

So, what happened after all of this? For years you had been living in this very public pressure cooker with visceral and tangible hate directed at you – being vulnerable in that way — in the context of trying to cope with it all, and then it comes to an end, what happened then?

Sandy: I left still loving the Collective and the individual women in it. Every one of them. And I still do. Every single one of them. They have a very special place in my heart.

I went back to Santa Cruz, and I took up my life, and the Santa Cruz community was extremely supportive. Shortly after I returned, a TERF called a community meeting in which the question was raised, whether I was a woman and whether I would be allowed into “women’s spaces.”

Cristan: Wait. So this is AFTER you left Olivia? This was after you went home and even then, they wouldn’t stop?

Sandy: After Olivia, I couldn’t go anywhere without being a lightning rod. Now, at this point, the question was, “Are we going to let trans women – who are men – into our community?” Well, Janice Raymond said something like “trans people divide women.” So, I “divided” my local women’s community.

This only serves to enhance his previously dominant role and to divide women, as men frequently do, when they make their presence necessary and vital to women. Having produced such divisiveness, one would think that if Stone’s commitment to and identification with women were genuinely woman-centered, he would have removed himself from Olivia and assumed some responsibility for the divisiveness. – Janice Raymond, PhD, The Transsexual Empire, The Making of the She-Male, page 102

The community voted on whether I would be “allowed into women’s spaces” and at that time at least 50 women came to the meeting. The vote was 49 to 1. There was one TERF at the meeting that refused to accept me. So, in fact I did divide the community. The TERF went off in a huff and I never heard from her again and that was the end of that. Since then, I’ve just been another member of the GLBT community in Santa Cruz, California. I consider this to be my heart’s home.

Life went on except for the fact that I have this kind of parallel identity, this kind of Gollum named “Sandy Stone” that walks around and does things that I don’t know anything about and shows up at places that I’ve never been.

Cristan: [Laughs]

Sandy: It’s been more or less like that, to a diminishing extent, ever since. Occasionally, nice things will happen but then I’ll get broadsided by stuff. But then I met Donna Haraway, who was doing research for her paper on cyborgs, and I became involved with a university through a completely random chance event and I found my home in academic life. As soon as I said that “the university felt like home,” the whole universe — the Goddess – really pushed me into academia and essentially, I’ve been in academia ever since.

I don’t know if that answers your question of what happened afterwards, but what happened was that I fell into history in the sense that time began to pass in a way that it didn’t when I was with the Collective and in the years immediately after. I got an academic career, I felt more grounded, I got married, I have a kid and a grandkid and a family of 15 people here in town; time began to pass. That’s what I mean by, “I fell into history.” Life began to go on. I got happy. I guess that’s the best possible way to put that. I got happy and I’m still happy. I walk every day by the ocean, Cynbe comes home and we talk about geek stuff, I’ll work on some project, my kid will come around with a grandkid, I’ll have dinner for the rest of the family, they’ll all come over… I’m living life. If there was anything that I never expected to have in my life, it was contentment.

And I’m as astonished by that as I can possibly be.

Sandy Stone is the Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) and the Convergent Media program of the University of Texas at Austin; Senior Artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts; and Fellow of the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. In various incarnations she has been a filmmaker, rock ‘n roll music engineer, neurologist, social scientist, cultural theorist, and performer. She is the author of numerous publications including “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” and “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age”, both of which are available in a wide selection of translated editions. She lives in Austin, Texas and Santa Cruz, California with her husband Cynbe ru Taren (aka Jeffrey Prothero) and their cat, /dev/cat.

This article is part of an ongoing series exploring trans issues with feminist opinion leaders:

Share this:

Cristan Williams is a trans historian and pioneer in addressing the practical needs of the transgender community. She started the first trans homeless shelter in the South and co-founded the first federally funded trans-only homeless program, pioneered affordable healthcare for trans people in the Houston area, won the right for trans people to change their gender on Texas ID prior to surgery, started numerous trans social service programs and founded the Transgender Center as well as the Transgender Archives. Cristan is the editor at the social justice sites TransAdvocate.com and TheTERFs.com, is a long-term member and previous chair of the City of Houston HIV Prevention Planning Group.

The only aspect of this that I’m not in full support of is when trans activists seek to label transwomen as “women” and transmen as “men” — because they’re not the same. There are biological differences that are relevant to people — people who hold no bias against the trans community. Sexuality, for example, is not only about gender, it is also about sex. Because sex-reassignment surgery doesn’t completely change the sex of the individual and many traits still remain from the sex they were born, it is relevant to the sexuality of many individuals that someone meet certain biological criteria. There are men and women who find the idea of their partner having a womb to be a source of attraction to them — it is the sexualizing of the biology of the sex that they’re attracted to which is completely normal. There are men and women who find the idea of their partner having testes to be a source of attraction to them, and this is also completely normal. So, it’s not reasonable to call people “transphobic” when they find someone without these traits to be unattractive because attraction is not chosen any more than gender identity is. One watches their body and mind and comes to find out what they respond to, one cannot tell their body to react where it doesn’t. — And if one is turned off by the idea of something, that is still a legitimate aspect of attraction because one doesn’t choose to be turned off by the idea of something, either.

So, I really wish that this aspect of things gets improved upon. I’m completely for supporting the full healthcare of trans individuals, more research into treatment options and efficacy, and full protection under the law. But, I’m not for having my sexuality vilified because I don’t happen to be attracted to transsexuals. I’m not attracted to men or very “butch” or “femme” women either, but I don’t hate them at all and I’m certainly not prejudiced against them. It’s just not how my sexuality works. I hope that one day there’s terminology to describe whether one is oriented towards being attracted to trans individuals or not, because trans individuals are unique and valid as a group of people and it warrants a proper term to describe it. I know of many people oriented that way, but when someone’s not, it’s not necessary to vilify them. Let’s just respect each other.

I can understand why it’s important to a certain worldview to ontologically construct non-intersex and non-trans men and women as being non-men and non-women. It preserves a certain subject-object power relationship that underpins certain cultural understandings as being axiomatic. Giving up that level of privilege is a big ask.

Morgan

Okay, but the fact that some people are only attracted to women with wombs doesn’t make women without wombs not women. You’ve said yourself, you’re not attracted to trans women – or high butch or high femme women. But you don’t deny the womanhood of butch women or femme women based on whether or not you’re attracted to them.

The thing about defining people as men/women based on their anatomy is that there are always exceptions, even leaving trans and intersex people out of it. If having a womb is a key part of being a woman, what about a woman who has had a hysterectomy, for instance? You might no longer be attracted to her, if ‘having a womb’ is a key part of your attraction to women, but I doubt you’d deny that she was a woman.

I’m always really bemused and rather upset by this whole argument, which is one that comes up a lot. There are several reasons. There’s the obvious biological argument that I’ve raised above. People who say they can’t be attracted to trans people because of their reproductive organs usually go for the ‘I [dis]like vaginas’/’I [dis]like penises’, version, which you’ve at least sidestepped – presumably because it’s easier to counter with the fact that SRS exists, so who has a vagina/penis doesn’t necessarily equate to who was born with one. Moving the argument to testes and uteri sidesteps this, but is also pushing it, because how many people really are only attracted to people based on their internal organs?

And why are they the ones whose attractions are prioritized? Because there are plenty of people who are attracted to women because they look and act like women, not because they have a functioning uterus, or attracted to men because they look and act like men, not because they were born with a set of testes. Do their attractions not contribute to the definition of men and women?

But none of that really cuts to the core of why this is a HORRIBLE argument.
To wit – are we really going to define whether people are real men/real women based purely on whether we’re sexually attracted to them? Because, frankly, EW. Are the only women who are women really the ones who you’re attracted to? Or who some hypothetical person whose sexuality revolves around whether their partner has a uterus and not around whether they’re, you know, nice, or pretty, or anything, is attracted to? If we’re using sexual desirability as a criteria for womanhood, are ugly women not women? If reproductive capacity is important, are infertile women not women? Are women who don’t want to have sex and whose desirability is therefore frankly irrelevant to anyone not women? If you’re not attracted to redheads, are ginger women no longer women?

We complain about reduction of women to sexual objects when men do it, so why is it okay to define trans women’s womanhood based on whether or not you’d fuck them? Or for that matter, trans men’s? Or anyone’s? No-one’s worth or personhood or identity or, for that matter, gender, should be defined by whether or not people want to fuck them. Because that would be abhorrent.

Sandy- they say that the best revenge is to live well. While other forms may seem more… cathartic, living well probably has the longest effect. It seems that you’re doing that, so keep on having your revenge!

BTW- why was saying ‘that’s bullshit’ the worst thing you could have said? It was bullshit! What did they expect you to do, I wonder? Cry? Faint? Have a fit of the vapours? Ugh. Poisonous idiots.

It amazes me how these people claim to be against gender. Trans people are the most active affront against gender that there is. Gender is a barrier and how do you defeat a barrier? By crossing it. You don’t sit around and be critical of it, you brake it down and make it infinity cross-able. What if people had decided that rather then trampling the Berlin wall they would sit around being critical of it? As an actual Post-gender person I clearly see their stance as indefensible. They claim to be “Against gender” while at the same time supporting the strict enforcement of traditionalist gender roles and standards. They worship gender as a god, demanding it define the lives of others as it does their own. No individuality, no sense, no empathy, and an identity entirely based around their genitals. They have a paranoid world view where that trans-teen shopping in H&M is actually an “Infiltrator spy”, and every public restroom is a rape-o-torium. It’s pathetic and sad. What a horrid color to paint our world, just for some meaningless sense of exclusivity and community. It may fill in the hole where your personality is supposed to be, but it won’t be very pretty.

Oh if only it was so simple for hate and loathing offend but only the host until, like the stench of a cadaver-smelling fart it flees from the host and offends…and offends and offends again and again and again—-for decades. Thank you for your keen insight…it is time to stop being so gentle and go on the offensive, metaphorically speaking of course. No expletives, no farts, no stench…just plain-English “you stink and you stink bad” graphic and yet truthful depictions of their behavior.

No need to defend gender—the government and doctors already do(ID). No need to keep educating those that refuse such (Trans exclusive history). No need to play dirty, or we soil our own underpants. No need for expletives and vulgarity…that’s “manhandling” which they excel at far better than any schoolyard bully. No need to try and make sense out of nonsense—sense and nonsense refuse to be bedfellows. No need to specify the players: they already proudly self-identify; indeed their actions speak far better than any label. No need to seek others who articulate well: we are already blessed with plenty, self excluded of course. No need to seek passion. We have an abundance of passion. No need to do anything but to say what we mean and mean what we say. When we say “you are scum”, we mean “you are scum”, not as an expletive phrase but literally scum based on comportment, hate, backstabbing, and violent outbursts of psychological torment that has and continues to result in trans trauma.

The absolute biggest mistake we can make, and some of us have, is not to get angry for anger is a perfectly reasonable emotion, but to “respond in kind”…..that is reciprocated anger. Everyone when wronged becomes flush with anger however to express it toward our adversaries is to bite the bait and fall into their trap. It is exactly as you say: they are gender foes while at the same time advocating for and violating gender expectations (masculine garb, masculine aesthetics, hair, and above all behavior). This is why I have reached the conclusion that they are trans men who, by attacking the concept of trans femininity, satiate some inner demons that make their soul their home. How on earth can an objective person conclude that these are females on all counts? Forget whatever their privates are…they are private and have zero bearing, despite their constant focus on Mr. Penis and Mrs. Vagina.

These are walking, talking, farting (from upper orifice and nether regions) contradictions! Again, it’s not hyperbole—it is precisely as you say! Nonsense = no sense. They cry “RAPE!!!!” where there is no rape…except of course that rapist back in anytown, USA who did rape…and so nonsense says that predictably all males rape! This started back when lesbians, no longer prey as lesbians continue to be across the world…many of which pay for their sexual choice with their own lives…..lesbians, free from no longer having to fight for their right of sexual choice, turned their lust for power and supremacy on other females, merely for being guilty of having been born male. The mainstream dictionaries have an incomplete synonym list for “nonsense”: it is missing TERF as a synonym.

Those of us who not only swore to protect our nation from “enemies foreign and domestic, only to take another oath as civilian enforcers, never ever initiate a public contact with an expectation that gender A is safer than gender B. A bullet has no male or female face, just a skull and crossbones, a point well made in this superb article. This reality is borne out in the existence of female prisons and female gang members. Anger, temperament and violence have never been solely masculine traits—ever. Males always win this contest by virtue of sheer size and the potent steroid of testosterone. The truth that females are capable of aggression is demonstrated by the fact that female soldiers comprise a not insignificant role in a nation’s arsenal, as soldiers trained to be lethal in defense or offense.

Ironically, the psychological warfare spearheaded by TERF f-star imbecile bigot general J. Raymond to oust Stone employed the very violence that TERFs claim as the reason for excluding trans females in the first place. If in fact this is a true depiction of what did occur, and I am not trying to imply or say otherwise, then the TERF movement was borne of the same lunacy as other militant groups. It is a lunacy that exists outside of reasonable thought or understanding. It is an illness deep in the mind that mimics the ferocity of a cornered animal. As is the case today, it involves a militant group of women who step outside of their sphere of concern and invade other spheres, in this case Olivia records. Displaying this very lunacy, they exile Sandy Stone from the altar of the female goddess, only to then adopt a defensive posture and defend “female spaces” at all costs. This “commit evil” in the name of good is nothing new, and continues even today.

To think that this began deceptively innocuous “we welcome your comments” and escalated to anonymous all-out-war with cowardice leading the way—-wow…..where’s the reasonable actions here? In my home state of California, making such threats would now be enforceable under CA PC section 422. The TERF movement presupposes, even at its birth, that we who have a transitioned history have played “previously dominant roles…to divide women, as men frequently do”. Such is not the history of most of us. To the contrary, most of us, self included, lacking such male dominance, have been bullied and called “sissies”, for being too soft or not “male-strong”. Before the arrival of the internet which introduced “non-dominant” trans children to the world, their garbage-bag full of lies sounded plausible. Trans children are showing the world that we’ve always been here, even if the Internet was not.

The TERFs didn’t know when to stop crying wolf, and now it’s too late. While the presence of trans children serves to vindicate trans adults, ironically their very presence serves to indict TERFs. The gnashing of teeth resonates in increasing decibels with every trans victory. Soon TERFs will find their rightful place in trans history…their role of trans nemesis will never go away, but history is very quickly directing them to the nearest —————EXIT. It isn’t that gender hurts, but that Raymond and Jeffries hurt…precisely as this story says so itself.

kenneth

How can you run a piece entitled ‘TERF Hate” and invoke so much hatred here? Just sayin’.

How does telling the truth about the history of violence and discrimination directed towards some women in particular – and as a group – invoke hate? Should it have remained a story that was covered up?

Lisa Harney

How can you post something so thoroughly dishonest as to suggest that Cristan Williams is the one invoking hatred?